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The mysterious and unspoken secrets of life can be a source of fascination for young people. The bildungsroman quest for identity is often coupled with a protagonist’s attempts to decode a range of secrets. Jamaica Kincaid’s work of fiction, Annie John (1985), illustrates this journey. In this novel, the female protagonist’s maturity and character development become possible only through her persistent efforts to decode the secrets of life. This paper discusses how, in a series of adventures, those secrets are embedded into Annie’s story and how her coming-of-age mystery is ultimately resolved.

The year 2017 was pivotal for women because of the #MeToo movement’s global momentum. People were alerted to the abuses of power and sexual harassment by male authorities in different fields such as government, entertainment and industry. These scandals also helped bring attention to the objectification of women’s normalised bodies and their subjugation in patriarchal cultures. Yet neither this disempowerment of women nor women’s coming forward new, because they have been widely explored in contemporary women’s writing. Examining Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill ’s poetry from the prism of #MeToo, this paper discusses women’s imprisonment and silence, their harassment and victimisation and the docility of their bodies in traditional patriarchal discourse. This paper aims to investigate how women are monitored physically and mentally in male-centred contexts, how they are molested in traditional societies and how they can be empowered by coming forward and telling their own stories. Keywords: the #MeToo movement; Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill; women; harassment; silence

Traditionally, the act of reading literature has been predicated on the decoding of contextual meanings. Most readers are eager to locate the semantic meanings because knowing what the text means s...

Across the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching effects on many aspects of our everyday lives. Changes have also been apparent in the field of teaching since most teaching now has to b...

While humans in the twenty-first century are still troubled by controversial issues such as race, gender, and class, a non-human movement has been restlessly advancing in the past few years, prompt...

For centuries women have been subordinated, repressed, and intimidated in different ways. However, women in the contemporary world are trying to reclaim their natural rights. Ireland is a complex c...

Women’s subordinate status in twentieth-century Irish literature has come under criticism in recent years. Irish women’s subjugation becomes apparent when we compare W. B. Yeats and Augusta Gregory. Whereas Yeats has been universally acknowledged in the past few decades as the spokesman of the Irish Literary Revival and an icon of modern Irish literature, Lady Gregory was ridiculed by George Bernard Shaw as the helping maid of the Abbey Theater. In this paper, a textual analysis of Lady Gregory’s plays is brought into discussion with Carol Gilligan’s and Nel Noddings’s feminist ethics to further explore the role women played in modern Irish literature. This paper aims at clarifying the nature of female writing as exemplified in Lady Gregory’s works. Unlike traditional studies on Lady Gregory and her plays, which focus on women’s subjugation in the male-dominated Irish society around the early twentieth century, the main findings of this research help shed new lights on the value of women in Gregory’s plays via an ethical feminist approach. The implication of this study is that women, who are apparently disempowered in traditional male-oriented moral thinking, are much more valuable and powerful when they are evaluated from ethical feminism.

Bodily discourse, constantly appropriated as a symbol of Irish famine and hunger in the wake of British maladministration of the land and its people since the Great Famine, is prevalent in Irish culture. However, this bodily discourse is dominated by nationalistic and patriarchal narratives. An increasing number of women in contemporary Ireland look at themselves anew through their own bodies. Through the reading of Eithne Strong’s poetry collection, Flesh: The Greatest Sin (1980), this paper discusses how the conflation of body and sin is entangled in the Irish context, how the female writer manages to untangle the fine line fabricated between the two categories and reaffirm her female identity simultaneously, and finally the significance of such an attempt in the history of Irish literature. Keywords: the body; female identity; Eithne Strong; Flesh; The Greatest Sin

The signing of the contentious Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921 was a traumatic experience for many Irish people. This is not only because of the ensuing Irish Civil War, but the psychological adjustments that the Irish people have to make in their partitioned land. Since the Irish Republican Army (IRA) emerged during the Anglo-Irish War (1919-21), it has been bent on terminating the British government’s control of Ireland and establishing a truly independent and unified Irish Republic through armed struggles. This traumatic history, which was embedded with the conflicts and compromises of such struggles, became a pivotal issue in many Irish writings. As a consequence, it helped shape subsequent Irish literature and culture when the dream of a free and unified Ireland was constantly recalled and reconfigured. These painful markings are reflected in complex ways in Edna O’Brien’s fiction House of Splendid Isolation (1994), in which an IRA fugitive named McGreevy holes up and finally bonds with Josie O’Meara, an aged widow, in a dilapidated house. Apart from the political turmoil, considerable anguishes caused by love and marriage converge to entangle the protagonists’ traumas. This paper focuses on how, by shifting between the multifarious narrative perspectives, O’Brien’s House of Splendid Isolation stitches the interwoven personal, interpersonal, and national suffering together. In addition, the role women play in facilitating sympathetic understanding and reconciliation amid the violence and traumas in contemporary Ireland is discussed. The findings imply that, despite the age-old traumatic experiences caused by political conflicts in Ireland in the past few centuries, a trauma-free tomorrow via love and reconciliation, mostly with the help of women, is possible in contemporary Ireland.

Graham Greene (1904–1991) is critically-acclaimed as one of the best storytellers of the twentieth century. Part of Greene’s distinction lies in his depiction of the ever-conflicted emotions that plague human beings. This emotional complexity is intensified as the Catholic religion conflates with the sensual and sexual values sanctified in the mundane world. Thus, although Greene frequently expressed his irritation at being labeled a Catholic writer, many critics maintain that understanding the close connection between religion, politics, and the theme of betrayal in Greene’s works is crucial. In The Heart of the Matter (1948), Greene presents Major Henry Scobie, an upright assistant police commissioner, who is involved in a triangular love relationship with his wife and a young widow in a West African coastal town. Torn between his sense of responsibility and his passion, Scobie is ensnared in love and guilt at the same time. Scobie’s emotional complexities, coupled with his troubled faith, paradoxically make him a heroic coward with tragic flaws as well as a sinner engulfed in a terrible conflict between passion and faith. This paper aims to discuss the emotional ambiguities of Scobie that arise from the conflations of love and marriage, pity and duty, humanity and divinity, evaluating the morality of Scobie and its implications.

Traditionally, fairy tales are filled with incredible, wondrous characters. Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales are a case in point. In Andersen’s “Thumbelina,” a stereotypical gender identity is manifest. However, unsatisfied with this asymmetrical scenario of men and women, Emma Donoghue (1969–), a critically acclaimed Irish writer in contemporary literature, is committed to deconstructing such gender stereotypes by re-writing the conventionally gender-biased tales, which is exemplified in her collection of revised fairy tales, Kissing the Witch (1997). Reading Donoghue’s “The Tale of the Bird,” a rewriting of Andersen’s “Thumbelina,” this paper argues that by subverting as well as imitating Andersen’s traditional tale, Donoghue lays bare tenacious gender stereotypes and puts forward an unconventional and unsettling feminist fairy tale.

In the past, Ireland was characterized by its mass emigration, an important phenomenon which has been widely discussed since the nineteenth century. The prosperity boom in Ireland since the 1980s has engendered significant economic, social, and cultural changes. Reading Donal Ryan’s “Eveline” (2014), a re-writing of James Joyce’s story of the same name which centers on the male protagonist’s unrequited love for an African immigrant, this chapter discusses how the main characters’ diasporic experiences in the twenty-first century continue and depart from the Irish tradition, and via a contrastive reading of Joyce’s and Ryan’s texts, how traditional gender relations are challenged and deconstructed along with the transformed conception of immigration in contemporary Ireland.

This paper aims to do justice to Iris Murdoch’s contribution to Irish short story writing. Although Murdoch is highly regarded among literary critics and common readers around the world, she is primarily labeled as a distinguished English novelist and philosopher. Grand narratives on themes such as morality and existence demarcate the majority of Murdoch criticism, while the fact that Dublin-born Murdoch also portrayed the contemporary Ireland she envisioned is unfairly obscured. This paper discuses Murdoch’s only extant short story titled Something Special, in which the dilemma of mid-twentieth-century Irish women is depicted. Introduction and conclusion aside, it falls into three parts. Part one presents the plight of Irish women amid the patriarchal society. Part two centers on the analysis of Yvonne Geary, the female protagonist of the story, against the backdrop of male-centered Irish culture. In part three, Yvonne’s dissatisfaction with the status quo as well as her efforts to get out from under the patriarchal tradition is investigated. It is found that this less documented Irish text sheds new light on the discussion of twentieth-century Irish women by inventing the prototypical feminist character, Yvonne Geary, and the story prefigures other feminist characters that subsequently arise in contemporary Irish literature.